Soooo, you want a subject to debate eh?

[cee-dee]

Here's and old subject with a slant that's not been here before.

The old subject is................ aliens (I hear the groans) and the possibility they might have been here.

Now old hands will know of my interest in Sumer and the strange things they wrote but before you scoot off leaving the rest unread, just hear me out?

Briefly, the Sumerians seemed to write about things an ancient people "shouldn't" have known about. At their time, a lot of "new" things appeared along with writing (that is if you can call impressions made in wet clay with a bit of stick, "writing").

They made a lot of claims, (most unsubstantiated) many were supposed to be that they had been "told" things by a race of "aliens" that had stayed on this Planet for some thousands of years. One puzzle is, if they were not "told", how did they know about the outer Planets?

Now, all over the World there are huge stone structures and for us now the puzzle is, "how did the ancients shift the huge lumps of stone?" Glib claims are made that they must have had "alien help" of some sort.

Now, let us for a few moments consider what we (as of 2014) would be liable to do if we were able to colonise another Planet and survive there for several thousand years.

Wouldn't we create the same sort of lifestyle and living conditions we have here? Remembering that within 60 years or so of Man first taking to the air in a primitive flying machine, we managed to send Men in to Space sooooo, if we colonised another Planet for even a thousand years, wouldn't one of the first things we'd do would be to build not only living quarters, but all the other structures we're used to like roads/bridges etc and to do that, what would we use to do that?

We'd develop, perfect and use something similar to what we use here and now and that's not huge stone blocks. We use a material comprised of a compacted concretion, CONCRETE. It's much easier to shift and can be "moulded" in to the shapes required in-situ.

As there's no sign of anything resembling concrete left here from "that time" and no mention of anything resembling concrete mentioned in any of the Sumerian writings (or any other culture for that matter), it would therefore seem likely that if anything was left here by a race of alien beings, it was only some partial knowledge.....??

[tommy.irene]

I would agree with you.. There is things that cant be explained..

[tommy.irene]

I wonder if we have a tea roll.

[saasher2012]

One wonders about the sanity of these people/ peoples, & where are the moderators ? A perfect example of baiting ,
A good thread thrown away before it's even had chance to get started!.

[duck_a_lorange]

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@cee-dee wrote:

We'd develop, perfect and use something similar to what we use here and now and that's not huge stone blocks. We use a material comprised of a compacted concretion, CONCRETE. It's much easier to shift and can be "moulded" in to the shapes required in-situ.

As there's no sign of anything resembling concrete left here from "that time" and no mention of anything resembling concrete mentioned in any of the Sumerian writings (or any other culture for that matter), it would therefore seem likely that if anything was left here by a race of alien beings, it was only some partial knowledge.....??

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The Romans had concrete (I knew that!) , so did the ancient Greeks, and the Assyrians (didn't know that...). (source - wiki).

To make concrete, you need cement, and to make cement you need fuel to burn the lime. I think Sumer was a bit short of coal and forests (hadn't found the oil then).  You would need a way to transport the fuel and lime to the construction site, because burnt lime is nasty caustic stuff and the wouldn't have had suitable containers.

They did use mud-brick, though - next best thing?

[tommy.irene]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterrestrial_life  .. is worth a read.

[cee-dee]

Yes, true but the Sumerians were not only writing about their present time, they were also writing about thousands of years before the time of actually writing.

Apart from the known users of concrete, there's been nothing found anywhere in the World from "unknown" users? Also, I'm talking about concrete usage more than 5,000 years ago.

[cee-dee]

Strange that there's no mention of the Sumerians there?

Anyway, as so mny have said before, the vastness of the Universe as we know it, the sheer number of Stars and the number of Stars likely to have habitable Planets lead to the probability that life exists elsewhere. The subject here is whether alien life forms had any hand in building the huge stone structures remaning on Earth and why no-one has ever mentioned the use of any form of concrete for building had any alien life form as "advanced" as us ever lived on this Planet for any length of time.

[duck_a_lorange]

It doesn't take much to lose technology. Anybody remember The Survivors"?

The thing I always think about is shoes. There is no mass-production of shoes in this country any more. Unless there is some in Europe, if for any reason sea and air freight stopped we would all be going barefoot in a couple of years (many new shoe soles disintegrate after this time). People woud improvise, of course, probably with car tyres, but it takes a working infrastructure to mass-produce anything.

[cee-dee]

Yes, but there's loads of written stuff about shoes and their manufacture but where's anything written about concrete prior to the Roman era and where's the remains of any concrete structures from thousands of years ago?

Going back to your shoes, in a couple of years I'm pretty sure we could make some shoes from Leather, same as they always were?

[blackburn_stevie]

On the subject of Space travel, aliens, etc. Here's y take on the Yanks landing men on the Moon in 1969. I don't believe that it happened. What I think happened is that N.A.S.A. were in deep doo-doo. They were getting billions, with a B, of dollars from the US axpayer and the only thing that they had to show for it was failed experiments. They needed a massive uplift to get the citizenry back on line and keep re-enlisting the N.A.S.A. loving President. To that end they developed the Space programme. Lots went right to begin with but when they got the idea of sending men to the Moon, they realised that the radiation belt that lay between the Earth and the Moon and which any spaceship would have to travel through would kill or badly injure any crew mmbers.

Because of this it was decided to kind of falsify what happened. A ship was sent up but didn't go through the radiation. Instead, it flew around for a while and then came home. Meanwhile,photographs were taken that pretended to show the crew landing, walking around, taking off etc but unfortunately, there were so many mistakes made in the photography and what it was supposed to show that the Conspitacy theorists had a field day.

To bring myself closer to the question asked in the OP, if you read all the books by Van Daniken BEFORE you read any of his detractors, then you have to conclude that an alien life-form lived on Earth at some time in the past. Maybe only for a few years but long enough to create cave drawings.

[guardpig]

Now, now.  Try reading a book called Quozl.  It is old and not very good but it will always make me wonder about advertising and propoganda. LOL

[saasher2012]

Shoes were made of reeds way before leather, & the Egyptians were not the only ones to build pyramids many similar things occurred all over so who first thought of them, where did the knowledge first begin?.

[cee-dee]

The knowledge about certain things is one thing but the materials used in the massive structures is quite another.

Were we to send a colony elsewhere in the Universe, we'd use the knowledge we had at the time to create what we're used to here.

It's beyond credibility to suggest that any culture advanced enough the travel through Space and survive wouldn't have developed a more easily manageable building material than huge chunks of stone.

[bankhaunter]

No doubt some structures were intended to impress and what better way than bulid large structures using impressive blocks of stone.

As for how they were done, we make a big mistake by assuming ancient peoples were not intelligent and did not have ways of doing things that have fallen out of use or been supplanted with different ways of thinking.

It takes a long time for ideas planted in people's heads to be replaced with new information, I wonder for example what percentage of people still think the pyramids were constructed by thousands of slaves.

A barn moved and a 19,200 pound block of concrete stood up on end by one person with no machinery

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCvx5gSnfW4

[cee-dee]

I've seen it before but how would the ancients have generated sufficient water pressure?

Before you even think about the head of water, you need to figure out how they'd make pipes and flexible ones at that using the tools and technology of their day.

As to shifting the stone blocks, the pyramid stone blocks weigh around 2½ tons each so try that lifting method with those blocks (forgetting for the moment the huge blocks inside) and think how many people and how long it would take to shift the number required.

[cee-dee]

Here's another theory about how the blocks of stone used to build the pyramids were shifted:-

http://news.sky.com/story/1252926/pyramids-biggest-mystery-finally-solved